RyFi
Active Member
Boy oh boy am I in trouble... I borrowed a pair of Snell Type C/iv from a neighbor about a month ago. He wasn't using them and my plan was to audition them and then perhaps offer to buy them. They live in a nice big room in my place and have plenty of space to do their thing. I don't have a lot of experience with higher end speakers but to my ears they sound beautiful. I'll skip the usual superlatives and get right to what happened. There isn't a whole lot out there on this exact model but they were made for a few years in the 90s and retailed for $2,200/pair new. They have both front and rear firing tweeters which are not the same (different rear and front tweets). Here's what happened...
I was listening to the TV through my system. I use one of those cheap FiiO D3 DACs to get from tv digital out to rca in on my receiver. My house seems to have an inordinate amount of static electricity in it and I am careful to discharge myself by touching the metal case of an ionizing blower thing I have plugged into the same power strip as the rest of my system before I touch my receiver or turntable. So tonight I touched the ionizer to discharge, a spark flew from my finger and at the same moment the DAC started emitting nothing but noise. A bit scary but I immediately hit the power switch on the receiver. It had happened before and all that was needed was to unplug and replug the DAC and it would then work fine. A bit later it happened again (another discharge, spark, and noise from the DAC) but this time when I turned the receiver back on, both of the front firing tweeters on the Snells were dead. My guess is that the noise from the DAC was full of nasty square waves/distortion and was the cause of the tweeter death. The woofers and mid-range drivers seem to be unaffected. The other thought I had was that perhaps something in the crossovers failed and not the tweeters themselves. The reason for this thought is that the rear firing tweeters can still be heard faintly but at a much much lower volume than when the front firing were working.
So my question is - could the nasty noise (square wave distortion?) from the DAC have damaged something OTHER than the tweeters? Could there be a damaged component (capacitor? resistor? inductor? interior fuse?) that has cut off the signal to the front tweeters and only allowing a small bit of signal to the rear tweeters? I'm guessing unlikely. I looked on Atomic HiFi and TV which is apparently the place to get Snell parts and they have the front tweeters listed for $95 each but no rear tweets for my model.
I am sick about having to tell my neighbor especially since he told me a week or so ago that he was re-energized by my interest and had made room for them and wanted to listen to them when I was done auditioning them.
Any help, advice, empathy, voodoo speaker spells, etc would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!
(EDIT) As soon as I posted this I realized I hadn't checked the OUTER fuses. I assumed they were fine because the other drivers are working. The fuses on both speakers have broken filaments. As it's 1 am I'll have to wait to get some fuses until morning. Is it common for fuses to only be wired to protect the tweeters? Can fuses protect against the kind of thing I described earlier? I feel like an idiot but if this is all the problem is I will be the most relieved idiot in Speakertown...
I was listening to the TV through my system. I use one of those cheap FiiO D3 DACs to get from tv digital out to rca in on my receiver. My house seems to have an inordinate amount of static electricity in it and I am careful to discharge myself by touching the metal case of an ionizing blower thing I have plugged into the same power strip as the rest of my system before I touch my receiver or turntable. So tonight I touched the ionizer to discharge, a spark flew from my finger and at the same moment the DAC started emitting nothing but noise. A bit scary but I immediately hit the power switch on the receiver. It had happened before and all that was needed was to unplug and replug the DAC and it would then work fine. A bit later it happened again (another discharge, spark, and noise from the DAC) but this time when I turned the receiver back on, both of the front firing tweeters on the Snells were dead. My guess is that the noise from the DAC was full of nasty square waves/distortion and was the cause of the tweeter death. The woofers and mid-range drivers seem to be unaffected. The other thought I had was that perhaps something in the crossovers failed and not the tweeters themselves. The reason for this thought is that the rear firing tweeters can still be heard faintly but at a much much lower volume than when the front firing were working.
So my question is - could the nasty noise (square wave distortion?) from the DAC have damaged something OTHER than the tweeters? Could there be a damaged component (capacitor? resistor? inductor? interior fuse?) that has cut off the signal to the front tweeters and only allowing a small bit of signal to the rear tweeters? I'm guessing unlikely. I looked on Atomic HiFi and TV which is apparently the place to get Snell parts and they have the front tweeters listed for $95 each but no rear tweets for my model.
I am sick about having to tell my neighbor especially since he told me a week or so ago that he was re-energized by my interest and had made room for them and wanted to listen to them when I was done auditioning them.
Any help, advice, empathy, voodoo speaker spells, etc would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!
(EDIT) As soon as I posted this I realized I hadn't checked the OUTER fuses. I assumed they were fine because the other drivers are working. The fuses on both speakers have broken filaments. As it's 1 am I'll have to wait to get some fuses until morning. Is it common for fuses to only be wired to protect the tweeters? Can fuses protect against the kind of thing I described earlier? I feel like an idiot but if this is all the problem is I will be the most relieved idiot in Speakertown...
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